Review: Song to Song (2017)

When cooking a steak, be sure to awkwardly stare at it until it heats itself.

Malick's ongoing scriptless Shoot the Rodeo projects continue their study of the Human Osprey, squandering the goodwill of performers and viewers alike and generally sucking valuable oxygen away from the working class. A movie about musicians and producers who fuck each other has never contained so little music or fucking. It's amazing that his steadicams and fish-eye lenses haven't been confiscated by a government or an angry mob.

The film, in comparison to his recent works, is at least telling a story this time. The four featured characters have discernible arcs -- relationships start and end, mistakes lead to revelations, somebody dies tragically... all could be universally relatable experiences if they weren't set between the 200 vacations they go on over the course of, seemingly, one year. When the film doesn't twitch with faint signs of life or when Malick splices in footage from Voyage of Time to wake you up, you can derive some suspense from reimagining it all as a PSA on sexually transmitted diseases, because nobody-but-nobody wants Cate Blanchett to get herpes.

You know the pattern by now and you can imagine the entire film, start to finish, without seeing a single frame of it. In addition to the minor positives above, I'll say that Malick also included the line from one of his Osprey surrogates, "I could go on for hours with one chord..." as perhaps the ultimate proof of self-awareness. Remember when this guy only made films every 20 years? Those were the fucking goddamn days.

Review: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017)

Baumbach's Embarassing Dad Years.

Consequences of an incestuous family come home to roost in Shadow Earth's The Royal Tenenbaums 2, where all of the kids have grown up and have kept themselves busy by churning out anxious little copies of themselves. Will our characters something-something in time?

Hoffman, substituting the Jeff Daniels role while wearing Brian De Palma's wardrobe, remains an insufferable burden on his ex-wives and children (Sandler, Stiller, Marvel), where his lack of social awareness forces them to micromanage his behavior and ride the bull for as long as they can before the patience of the universe wears thin. Moments of joy are fleeting, moments of frustration linger, and a car gets beaten up. Standard fare, really.

Taken in the short view, it's hard to know if these experiences are transforming the characters into stronger individuals or further galvanizing them into one mess of a family, doomed to forever live under the high-maintenance shadow of their father. Transformations are internal and never-ending; in Baumbach's films, the transformations may never begin. The hopeful message of the ending casts the Meyerowitz siblings as a buffer generation between their children and their grandparents, that as long as they can contain their neuroses, the next generation is saved. Okay... the joke's on them when their kids unknowingly create another Hoffman.

Baumbach is building a Cinematic Universe of Discomfort with only slight maneuvering of continuity. Books become sculptures, adoptions become births, ping-pong (paddle-that-cock) becomes pool, Pais becomes Eisenberg becomes Stiller becomes Sandler, and Laura Palmer is rescued between every film. The performances are so good and the situations so infuriating that a complete and utter lack of movement doesn't matter. This is far from the filmmaker's best and an admirable distance from his worst, but I do appreciate this new age of Baumbach where actors remember they can act and film remembers how to be film.

Review: Dunkirk (2017)

Dunkirk is a war film of an unusual sort, one that frustrates as it entertains, though not in equal measure. Nolan's usual trademarks (quick pacing, gimmicky time manipulation, non-sensationalist cinematography) blast us through an intense, rarely-portrayed moment in history -- a retreat! -- while deftly avoiding the trappings of the genre (heavy-handed character development, an all-powerful antagonist with a scar on his face). Its ballsy approach breathes life into what has become routine, a genre that wears out its welcome the older Braveheart gets. Loving everything about Dunkirk would be a whole lot easier... if we didn't have, er, History to ruin it.

It is perhaps a mistake to lean too far into glorifying the Event instead of merely portraying it. Without a flashback scene or one where someone stares longingly at a blood-stained photograph of a wife and child, the main character is the Dunkirk Evacuation itself and with it the baggage of any bottom-up artistic licenses. Cillian Murphy is the lone survivor (???) of a torpedoed ship because the story requires him to be. French and British soldiers holding the line are needlessly simplified as the result of a German tactic of not "wasting precious tanks." In the film's most egregious scene, three different war film clichés collide in one tugboat. It's a shame, as with Interstellar, that Nolan simply can't go whole-hog on an objective POV. Somebody just gots to have a crowbar.

Poor decisions like these accumulate to lessen the overall impact of the film. The "miracle" of the real-life evacuation is the result of solidarity, the protective instinct of soldiers and civilians, which is difficult to convey when the story conspires to tell us otherwise. Not that this could please everyone, but those most displeased should be British soldiers, who only have deserters and shell-shocked madmen portraying them -- unless, of course, you're in the RAF, then you're safe.

So, at this stage in his life, Christopher Nolan has a number of achievements under his belt that anyone could count as proof of "doing enough." The next step in his plan, mimicking the career of Steven Spielberg, is a lofty goal but hey, if anyone can do it...

*waits patiently for Nolan's kids movie*